Why Hollywood politics will never win the British vote

Eddie Izzard has been photographed in New York doing what Eddie Izzard does so casually: wearing high heels and trying on lipstick. For New Yorkers, that sort of thing is de rigueur – and 21st-century Britons are probably no less tolerant. We’ve not only legalised gay marriage but also helped hand the Eurovision crown to a bearded lady, so the fact that a cross-dresser like Mr Izzard has ambitions to become Mayor of London isn’t nearly as transgressive as it once would have been.

But the thought of a professional comedian and actor winning an election might be a step too far. For, while Izzard’s current US tour takes him across a country where politics and the entertainment industry are inseparable, in Britain we like to keep the two strictly apart. The reasons for that tell us a lot about the enormous cultural differences between our two countries.

Hollywood is an integral part of the American political process. The movie business has produced presidents (Ronald Reagan), governors (Arnold Schwarzenegger), congressmen (Sonny Bono) and ambassadors (Shirley Temple). In 2012, individual Hollywood donors gave around $13 million to Obama’s re-election effort; producer Jeffrey Katzenberg gave about $3 million alone.

Unsurprisingly, the fusion of art and power is at its most intense in California. Bobby Shriver, a scion of the Kennedy dynasty, is currently running for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors (a little like the Greater London Authority) and boasts a long list of glamorous Hollywood endorsements – including Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg. His opponent, Sheila Kuehl, is a former sitcom child star who can name-drop Barbra Streisand but is considerably reduced from her acting days (she still drives the 1964 Porsche that she bought at the height of her success). When Shriver met Kuehl at a recent debate, he referred to the 73-year-old’s former tomboy character by giving her a cheery greeting of “hello, young lady!”. She replied: “Please don’t call me that. It’s disrespectful to an equal, and demeaning.”

British observers might cheer proletarian Kuehl’s dignity, but still sigh wearily at California’s brash celebrity democracy. We like our politicians to be entertaining, but we don’t particularly like our entertainers to be political.

Of course there are exceptions to that rule. Glenda Jackson is a firebrand Labour backbencher; GMTV has helped cast Gloria De Piero as shadow minister for women and equalities and Esther McVey as minister for employment. But beyond them and Izzard, British showbiz limits itself to casual endorsements that aren’t exactly crucial to the outcome of elections.

Did it make a difference that Gary Barlow and Michael Caine were both seen with David Cameron in 2010, or that Daniel Radcliffe leant his diminutive stature to Nick Clegg? Gordon Brown attracted Sean Pertwee and David Tennant, but he still spent all our money and lost the election. Then there are the fun, more obscure endorsements that could make a good round of Pointless. Tony Benn once went campaigning with Stephen Lewis, aka Blakey in On The Buses (“I ’ate you Butler!”).

Wedgie described him as “a good socialist and extremely amusing”. Last of the Summer Wine, which is very unamusing, almost never made it on to our screens because stars Bill Owen (Compo) and Michael Bates (Cyril Blamire) disagreed so violently over politics. Peter Sallis (Cleggie) explained, “Michael was slightly to the Right of Margaret Thatcher and Bill was slightly to the Left of Lenin.”

Owen fronted the Eighties campaign against Sunday trading, which came to naught. And when Robert Kilroy-Silk and Joan Collins teamed up to boost Ukip in 2004, it garnered interest mostly for the curious campness of the pairing. Paradoxically, an over-reliance on celebrity endorsements can underline a party’s fledgling status, its desperation to be heard.

When John Cleese opened a party political broadcast in 1987 for the SDP-Liberal Alliance by apologising for wasting the viewers’ time, it was meant as a joke but also had a whiff of resignation about it. The fact that Ukip isn’t relying on celebrity endorsements this year is perhaps a recognition that they don’t have to. They already have a comedy star, and his name is Nigel Farage.

We could thank/blame the BBC for the relative lack of celebrity politics. Not only does its obsession with balance discourage activism on the part of its performers, but having a cultural sphere dominated by a huge publicly funded monopoly discourages the kind of private enterprise that can, and will, throw its money at politicians. In the US, Hollywood spends partly for ideological reasons but also because it wants the government to protect its interests. Moreover, American stars earn the kind of cash that makes even Jonathan Ross look like a pauper – and so have the disposable income to waste on fundraisers where they can network and do deals. Not that Americans apparently regard politics as a waste of money. In 2012, the presidential candidates collectively spent $2 billion. In the 2010 British general election, a limit was placed on expenditure of £19.5 million and, incredibly, no party reached it.

More important though are the contrasting British and American attitudes towards celebrity itself. America is an aspirational country, so stardom – with its associated brains, beauty and money – is the subject of admiration. Britain, by contrast, is a nation of cynical inverted snobs. Ed Miliband is dismissed as an out-of-touch wonk because his father was an academic; David Cameron knows nothing about the real world because he went to a good school. Likewise, celebrities are, in the words of Dame Edna Everage, “nobodies who got lucky”. Actors are admired for their talent but simultaneously ridiculed for taking it seriously, as luvvies who have a nervous breakdown if photographed at the wrong angle.

The only performers whose intelligence we respect are comedians. Why? Because they don’t take anything seriously at all, and we have come to mistake ironic nihilism for wisdom. In this regard, Eddie Izzard doesn’t necessarily benefit from being a comedian: his humour is far too gentle and charitable. Likewise, Russell Brand’s attempt to redefine himself as an over-sexed Karl Marx has fallen short in part because he seems a bit too earnest about the whole thing. People are starting to suspect that we are not witnessing a clever joke but the first stages of a nervous breakdown that will end in Brand wearing shell-suits and calling himself Jesus.

So, celebrity politics makes much better sense in America, where its brand of aspirational capitalism gives it genuine material and emotional power. Of course, the American Dream is a contradictory and confusing one. The stars backing Bobby Shriver admire a “people’s champion” who no ordinary person can ever hope to emulate, because he largely inherited, not made, his wealth. The truly aspirational candidate in the Los Angeles race is actually the former sitcom star, who left showbusiness to dedicate herself to helping others in the humdrum worlds of local politics and gay rights. Sheila Kuehl might have made her name there, but she’s the least Hollywood person in the race.

And we Brits are given to paradox, too. Here, the very absurdity of Eddie Izzard’s ambitions might turn him into an unlikely underdog. In a country where entertainers are not supposed to have opinions, his ambition to become Mayor is admirably eccentric. Perhaps the cross-dressing comedian is still a revolutionary after all.